Someone referred to the Goytisolo brothers as our Brontës.
The three brothers, José Agustín (1928-1999), Juan (1931-2017), and Luis (1935-2026), were extraordinary writers.
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Poet, the eldest, and novelists, the two younger ones. It is rare to find such an exceptional case in the same family.
José Agustín referred to the fact that perhaps it was the trauma of losing their mother, who died in Barcelona in 1938 as a result of a bombing during the civil war, that led them to writing.
Luis, the youngest, who has just left us at 91 years old, was the longest-lived of the three and the only one to have held a seat at the RAE since 1994. He frequented the Academy regularly until last year, despite living in the town of Montblanc (Tarragona) and having to travel on increasingly unreliable trains, which often forced him to spend the night in Madrid.
With his first novel, Las afueras, he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize in 1958, in its first edition, created by the Seix Barral publishing house. He was twenty-three years old, studying law at the University of Barcelona, and belonged to the Communist Party. Precisely because of his political militancy, he was imprisoned along with Joaquín Marco.
Carmen Balcells mentioned him as the first author represented by her agency, something that, although not entirely true, the agent liked to say a lot and Luis liked even more to hear it.
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His most ambitious work, and the one that establishes him as one of the great European authors of his time, is the tetralogy Antagonía, composed of Recuento (1973), Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar (1976), La cólera de Aquiles (1979), and Teoría del conocimiento (1981), which the Anagrama publishing house published together in 2013. Just as happened in 1617 with Don Quixote, whose first and second parts were edited together for the first time in Barcelona, never to be separated and to be understood as a whole, the nearly twelve hundred pages of the Antagonía volume together reinforce the importance of its transgressive and experimental cohesion.
Goytisolo was a candidate for the Nobel Prize on several occasions and with ample merit could have won it.
He received the Carlos Fuentes Prize for literary career in 2018 and previously, in 2013, the Spanish Letters Prize, awarded for his entire body of work by a jury that took into great account how much Luis Goytisolo’s work combines narrative insight with literary experimentation. Also in 2013, he won the Anagrama Essay Prize for Naturaleza de la novela, a reflection on the art of storytelling.
He collaborated with various national and international newspapers and also with Spanish Television, for which he directed two excellent documentaries about the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
A cult writer, who did not care about being a bestseller or appearing on best-seller lists, he always enjoyed the favor of critics and a minority audience that has faithfully followed him since his beginnings.
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